In a war that lasted only 5 days it is hard to find many situations in which a stand up battle occurs with the war's defeated power having a shot at a "victory" unless the victory is some kind of survival or "has an undemoralized unit somewhere on the map" type victory. Having accomplished two of the latter types of victory with Daniel's Indian forces I was anxiously awaiting this one.

The Hyderabadis control the north bank of a river and the only bridge is dominated by urban terrain. The Hyderabadis have their usual mix of regular forces with fair morale (7/6) but the Razakar militia is becoming radical and has bumped its morale up to 8/5, giving the Hyderabadis a way to avoid being lower morale in every single assault hex.

The scenario itself is a single board one with three victory conditions for the Indian player, all of which must be met. Low losses, effective control of all urban terrain and a preponderance of the effective forces on the north side of the river at game's end. While Daniel was unable to meet these it was much closer than it would appear.

All four of the urban hexes were contested and only the high morale Razakars permitted the Hyderabadis to hold out well. Without the Razakars the Hyderabadi regulars would have run like the wind from the urban hexes. Late in the game it should be noted that the Hyderabad assault rolls were phenomenal which also helped as Daniel's forces were consistently disrupted and demoralized by much smaller defenders.

I was pleased to reach 10 step losses against the Indians but, as in our previous scenario last week, I was not able to get the final step loss which would have caused a failure on that particular victory condition.

Finally, the continued difficulty that Daniel is having with his Indian engineers (excuse me, sappers...) cropped up again. Both units were often in either a disrupted or demoralized state causing Daniel's attempt to cross the river away from the bridge to hit a stumbling block. Without this I suspect that the number of undemoralized steps on the north side of the river would have swung much further than 27-20 for the Indians.

Honestly, however, this is a tough one for the Indian player to win. They start out with an insufficient force to cause a serious breakdown in the Hyderabadi defense and although there are significant reinforcements, there are only 16 turns. The Indian player will have to expose his forces to serious damage or miss out on some of the potential victory conditions. I was able to accurately forecast Daniel's crossing points (it isn't hard to do given the victory conditions) and was able to move reinforcements to those locations which were threatened with ease given the lack of OBA (BTW, there is NO OBA at all in the Indian Unity scenarios, one wonders if the British decided to take all the big guns out of India early on after WW II).

There is plenty of value in this scenario and a pretty darn competitive play for the Hyderabadi player which was fun. I give it a "4".